One year on

New Year’s Day 2018 was the day I began this blog.

In the year that I’ve been writing I’ve achieved some pretty impressive stats. Unbelievably, this is post number 502… five hundred posts in one year! Weirdly the day that’s noted as having the highest number of views was the day I started writing poetry, January 7th. This is weird because back then I didn’t have many followers, whereas I now have almost 600 but I’ve never managed to exceed the number of views from that day.

Anyway, this post isn’t about blog stats. This post is about awesomeness, not necessarily mine, anyone or anything awesome can join the party!

As midnight approaches I’ve been thinking about how I started this blog and I remember writing that I didn’t do resolutions but instead just had hopes for 2018. Looking back at my very first post I see that what I actually wrote was that “My wish for 2018 is that I can succeed”. I went on to explain that success didn’t have to be big things, it could be any level of achievement, any goal that is met, anything that to the individual is a big deal.

I have no idea what I was thinking (if anything) when I wrote that. I do know that my mental health was rather precarious bank in January and that I had little confidence in my ability to do anything well and not a great deal of motivation to try, so I imagine I was hoping to check the boxes of daily tasks, cooking, shopping, cleaning… who knows? I certainly didn’t have a to-do list stating join a running club, volunteer at a pony sanctuary, and publish two books.

It’s strange how life has its own way of resolving itself. By that I mean if you take the monumental level of crap that’s been thrown my way over the years and dump it outside my front door, how do I get past it and move forward with life? The past, the infertility, the cancer, depression, family problems, whatever crap you’ve experienced it’s always there, you can’t escape it and it can be difficult to move past it and find a bright and shiny new future. However, for me, the mountain of challenging life experiences was the catalyst for change, I wrote about this in my post here. It’s only because of where I ended up in the summer of 2017, which was emotionally at my lowest point ever, that I have been able to take these experiences and use them to my benefit.

Life, my life, has found its own way to a better future.

So, rather than focus on specific goals and plans, or vague hopes and dreams, maybe we all could simply have one wish for 2019.

A wish to succeed.

A wish to take whatever your life is right now and make a small change, acknowledge each baby step of change as a success and look to the future with hope that these small changes will be the trigger to greater things.

I’ll close this post and end 2018 by simply saying ‘Thank you’.
I wish you all the best that 2019 can bring.